Quote

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Energy
Arguing
Domestication
Given
Sexual
Scruple
May
Reasons
Amenable
Reason
Nuclear
Scruples
Whole
Capacity
Inaccessible
Something
Prove
Ecstasy
Like
Quite
Argue
People
Sound
Sexuality
Plausibly

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Susan Sontag
Image
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
Image
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
Susan Sontag
Image
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
Image
The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
Image
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
Susan Sontag
Image
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Image
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Susan Sontag
Image
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
Susan Sontag
Image
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
Susan Sontag
Image
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
Image
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag
Image
Passion paralyzes good taste.
Susan Sontag
Image
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag